Computer Security Expert: IRS Really Is That Clueless

It's not a stretch to believe that sheer ignorance explains why IRS officials keep changing their story about missing emails to congressional investigators examining the tax agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits, a computer security expert told Newsmax TV on Thursday.

Vinny Troia, CEO of Night Lion Security, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that his own quick study of public records revealed a law-dropping level of cluelessness within the IRS about its own capabilities and procedures for data storage.

"One of the really alarming things about the IRS — if anyone goes and looks at their public audits from 2013, they really don't have their stuff together," said Troia, who is also a computer forensics investigator. "And that's all on public record.

"And for an organization like the IRS to not be able to secure its most critical information, like its customers' Social Security numbers and everything else about them, it makes you take a step back and say, 'OK, somebody really needs to interject here,'" he said.

The agency's latest explanation for not producing subpoenaed emails is that the backup tapes the sought after correspondence was stored on appear to be unreadable.

"I suspect that that means they know what tapes the [email] backups were on, but they've been overwritten so many times, that the data won't be — you won't be able to extract anything from it, anyway," said Troia.

The agency's prior — now inoperative — claim that the emails were simply gone because the backup tapes no longer existed is "laughable," said Troia, but also "completely plausible, because I don't think they have any clue what's going on over there."
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